Dusty 2002-2008
We lost Dusty last night. She was born literally under my window on a spring night in 2002. She bore five litters, and two of her kittens (Tegan and Louie) survived to adulthood.
She had been a strictly outdoor cat, one of the more domesticated of the tribe that wandered around our old property before we moved last year. Since their habitat was going to be completely destroyed (a road will be going through where our house was, and all of the wooded area behind the old house has since been cleared out) we brought her, Louie, and their cousin Teeny along with us as semi-indoor cats. Dusty alternated between the garage and the main house, but was never able to fully adjust to indoor living.
Last week, Dusty developed an upper respiratory infection we were helping her fight off, but along the way she just stopped eating, and short of force feeding her (which she would not allow me to do) there was nothing else we could do. I think she just lost the will to live. She seems to have gone peacefully, in her sleep.
This one isn’t hitting me as hard as losing T.C. back in 2006 (who, after all, had been my companion for 19 years), but this one is hurting.
My mother has spots on her lung and cysts on her liver.
If you’ve noticed a lack of tags on recent posts, it’s because the client I’ve been using, Semagic, doesn’t support tags under WordPress. I’ve had to go back in and add tags by hand.
However, I’ve now found a plugin to handle that for me, so I can tag as I write again, and won’t have to go back.
Now if I could only find a way of specifying my post-avatar from Semagic, too.
I got an intriguing rejection for Mall Bats (not from the major publisher I mentioned earlier, but someone else I had forgotten I had queried) this week (emphasis mine):
Thank you for submitting your novel Mall Bats to [snip]. Our Acquisitions Team has had an opportunity to read it, and feel we must pass on it at this time. However, we would like to invite you to resubmit your novel should you choose to make some revisions.
They then proceeded to list some minor changes, all to the first two chapters (their positive comments ran the entire manuscript, though), which they would want before resubmission.
Um…yes, I understand that rewrites are inevitable, and those changes you suggest are not only reasonable but constructive. However, if those are the only reasons you are rejecting the book, and making those changes would make you want it, then that’s the job of an editor. You buy the book, with the contract stipulating (as all legitimate literary contracts do) that the sale is contingent upon delivery of a revised manuscript meeting criteria set forth by the editor. You don’t ask someone to make the changes and then go back through the submission process.
Am I going to make those changes? Yes. They make sense and would help the book somewhat. They’re minor edits; it’s not like they want me to add or remove characters, or change the ending. Am I going to “resubmit” to them? No. I have other reasons (it turns out they e-publish first, then do print a year later “if sales warrant,” when e-publishing is as much the kiss of death as POD or self-publishing today), but the way they went about this sucks. If you’d buy the book if I made the changes, then make an offer contingent on edits. Don’t send me back through the slushpile. That’s a sign of an amateurish operation.
Sigh.
What should have been 16 hours on the road yesterday turned into pure hell.
On the way back, about 20 miles from the north end of the Northeast Extension (I-476 from Scranton to Valley Forge), I found a large rock right in the middle of my lane. Darkish in color, I didn’t see it until two seconds before the collision. On pure instinct I swerved to my right and my right rear tire went over the rock, causing a blowout. I managed to get the car off to the side of the road and called *11, the PA Turnpike’s emergency number.
It turned out I made the right decision. I thought I saw something metallic in the road as well as I was trying to avoid the rock. A road worker who found us while we were waiting for the police and AAA seemed very concerned. Turned out there was a muffler, oil pan, and the remains of an axle in the road just past the rock. If I hadn’t swerved and had driven directly over the rock, it would have taken out many important parts of the vehicle instead of just one tire.
I finally limped home on the spare tire (keeping my speed limited to 50 miles an hour) at 2:20 this morning, after being on the road since 6 AM yesterday, and having to get up for work this morning at 6 as well. Needless to say, I am not in very good spirits.
Going to be on the road all day today. Have to go to Olean, New York, and back. Planning to leave within the hour, to arrive back home at 9 PM tonight.
It’s confirmed. I go back into the hospital Thursday the 20th to get this damn procedure reversed. Probably be out of commission at least two weeks. Anyone who can help out Bryan during my convalescence, again, please let us know.
And last but not least, anyone interested in doing semi-regular radio comedy? Since I still own the lowbudgetradio.com domain I’ve been thinking about an easy to do podcast to replace the defunct Pab Sungenis Project. If you volunteer, I might occasionally (like twice a month) send you a script to be recorded that I’ll mix down into a final product. First “episode” would be a parody I’ve been toying around with called This American Death.
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